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Comparisons

Best ElevenLabs Alternatives in 2026, Compared

Compare the best ElevenLabs alternatives in 2026 on published prices, models and licensing, from Fish Audio and Cartesia to Murf, Speechify and OndaLabs.

10 min read
By OndaLabs Team

There is no single best ElevenLabs alternative. As of October 2026, the right pick depends on what you make: narration and voiceovers, API calls for an app, or open-weights models. Compare published prices per minute or per million characters, check whether paid plans include commercial use, and confirm the consent rules before cloning anyone's voice.

Every price below comes from a vendor's own pricing page, checked on 2026-10-17. Prices change, so confirm each one before you buy.

What ElevenLabs offers in October 2026

ElevenLabs is the baseline most readers already know. Its newest model, Eleven v4, launched on 2026-09-28 with a Turbo variant. v4 supports 90+ languages and accepts up to 10,000 characters in a single generation. ElevenLabs says v4 is ranked first by Artificial Analysis and preferred by about three in four listeners in blind tests. Those are vendor claims, reported in the Eleven v4 launch post, and this post does not treat them as independent results.

The plan ladder runs from a Free plan with 10,000 credits a month (about 10 minutes) to Business at $990 a month. Starter, the first paid tier, costs $6 a month and includes 30,000 credits. The ElevenLabs pricing page lists every tier, and the API has its own calculator on the ElevenLabs API pricing page.

ElevenLabs alternatives at a glance

The table below uses each vendor's cheapest paid plan and its published unit rate.

| Tool | Cheapest paid plan (Oct 2026) | Published API or unit rate | Commercial use | Notes | |---|---|---|---|---| | ElevenLabs | Starter, $6 a month (30,000 credits) | v4 at $0.08 per 1,000 characters | Paid plans | 90+ languages on v4 | | Fish Audio | Plus, $15 a month ($11 billed yearly) | $15 per 1M UTF-8 bytes (s2.1-pro) | Paid plans; check terms | Open-weights Drama 3 | | Cartesia | Pro, $5 a month (100K credits) | Credit-based; no per-character rate on the plan page | Pro and above | Sonic-3.6 model | | Speechify Studio | Starter, $100 a year (86,400 credits) | Studio credits | Paid plans | Voiceover and dubbing | | Murf | Creator, from $19 a month billed yearly | Falcon API at $0.01 per minute | Paid plans | Studio-style editor | | WellSaid | Starter, $10 a month billed yearly | Download minutes, no per-character rate | Paid plans | English voices on Starter | | OndaLabs | Starter, $9 a month (170,000 credits) | No API rate published | Starter and above | 30 voices, 37 language pages |

Plan prices are monthly unless a row says billed yearly. A credit in one product is not the same amount of audio as a credit in another, so compare the vendor's own minute figures. "Commercial use" here means what the vendor's pricing page says, not a replacement for the terms.

Alternatives for creators and voiceovers

If you make narration, explainers or video voiceovers, the choice usually comes down to how the tool meters your audio and what license comes with it.

Murf

Murf is a studio-style voiceover editor. Its help center lists the Creator plan at 2 hours of voice generation a month, or 24 hours a year. Murf's pricing summary lists Creator from $19 a month billed annually. Murf's free plan has no commercial license and no downloads. Murf's own pages give different hour limits for its higher tier, so check Murf's pricing page before you choose that plan.

WellSaid

WellSaid is built around English narration. Paid plans include full commercial rights. The Starter plan costs $10 a month billed annually, or $120 a year, and includes 240 download minutes a year. Generation is unlimited on paid plans, so download minutes are the real limit. Unused download minutes do not roll over. Voices on Starter and Pro are English only, and all languages come with Enterprise.

Speechify Studio

Speechify Studio is a separate subscription from the Speechify Reader app. The free tier gives 600 Studio credits and no commercial usage rights. Studio Starter costs $100 a year with 86,400 credits and commercial rights. Studio Creator costs $300 a year with 345,600 credits. Both paid tiers include voiceover, dubbing and a voice changer.

OndaLabs

OndaLabs is an AI voice studio. It offers text to speech with 30 prebuilt voices that work in every supported language, plus two-speaker dialogue and speech to text. The free plan gives 2,000 credits a month, which is about 2 minutes. Commercial use starts on the Starter plan at $9 a month, which includes 170,000 credits (about 189 minutes). You can compare every tier on the OndaLabs pricing page.

Alternatives for developers and APIs

API pricing is billed per unit, so compare the unit before you compare the number. These are list prices from each vendor's page as of 2026-10-17.

  • Fish Audio API: The s2.1-pro and s2-pro models cost $15 per 1M UTF-8 bytes, billed pay-as-you-go with no subscription or monthly minimum. The docs say 1M bytes is about 180,000 English words, or about 12 hours of speech. The s2.1-pro-free model is listed at $0, but the vendor describes free access as an initial period.
  • Google Cloud Chirp 3 HD: $30 per 1M characters after a free tier of 0 to 1 million characters. Instant custom voices cost $60 per 1M characters, per Google's pricing page.
  • Amazon Polly: Generative voices cost $30 per 1M characters and Neural voices cost $16. Standard costs $4 and Long-Form costs $100. The Generative free tier is 100K characters a month for the first 12 months, per AWS Polly pricing.
  • OpenAI: tts-1 costs $15 per 1M characters and tts-1-hd costs $30. gpt-4o-mini-tts is priced per token instead.
  • Cartesia: Plans are credit-based. The Free plan has no voice cloning, and Pro at $5 a month includes a commercial license and instant voice cloning.

For a like-for-like check, ElevenLabs' v4 list price of $0.08 per 1,000 characters works out to $80 per 1M characters. That figure is derived from the list price and counts characters, not bytes. Fish Audio counts bytes, and the two differ for non-English scripts, so treat any direct comparison between them as approximate.

Alternatives with open weights

Fish Audio is the one tool in this post with an open-weights release we verified. Its Drama 3 model launched on 2026-10-13, supports 83 languages and accepts inline direction in square brackets. The weights are on Hugging Face under the Fish Audio Community License v1.0. Under that license, research and non-commercial use are free. Commercial use is free if you and your affiliates have less than US$500,000 in annual revenue. Above that threshold, or if you offer the model as a TTS, voice-cloning or inference service or API, you need a license. The Drama 3 launch post reports a pronunciation robustness score of 93.2% against 88.1% for S2.1 Pro, citing Artificial Analysis. That is Fish Audio's own report, not an independent test by us.

Free options and what they allow

Free tiers are useful for testing a voice before you pay. Most do not include commercial rights.

  • ElevenLabs Free: 10,000 credits a month. The Free plan has no commercial license. Published output must credit "elevenlabs.io" or "11.ai" in the title.
  • Fish Audio Free: 8,000 credits a month and up to 7 minutes of generation. The plan FAQ says free output is for personal, non-commercial projects. Check the terms, because the plan card lists commercial use in a different place.
  • Cartesia Free: 20K credits a month, about 27 minutes, with no voice cloning.
  • Speechify Studio Free: 600 credits, with no commercial usage rights.
  • OndaLabs Free: 2,000 credits a month, about 2 minutes, with Onda Lite, expressive tags, dialogue, speech to text and 5 saved clips. Commercial use starts on Starter.

How to choose: a checklist

Use these questions to narrow the list before you test any voice:

  1. Price per minute of audio you need. Work out how many minutes you will generate each month and divide the plan price by that number, using the vendor's own minute figure.
  2. Commercial rights on the plan you would buy. Check the paid plan, not only the free tier.
  3. Voice cloning. Find out which plan unlocks it, and what consent or recording you need before you clone a voice.
  4. Language coverage. Check the languages your scripts use. Vendors count languages differently, and some split voices from models.
  5. App or API. Decide whether you need an API. Many creators only need a web app.
  6. Open weights. Choose this only if you can host the model and accept its license.

Where OndaLabs fits

OndaLabs is strongest for creators who want text to speech, two-speaker dialogue, transcription, image generation and music under one credit balance. Onda Lite costs 1 credit per character and is included on every plan. Onda Flash is the more expressive model at 1.5 credits per character, and it needs a paid plan. You direct delivery with plain words and supported expressive tags in the script. Custom voices can be cloned from a recording you have permission to use, or designed from a text description. The Creator plan includes 3 custom voices.

OndaLabs is not positioned as a developer API in this post, and it makes no API, latency or benchmark claims here. Fish Audio publishes an API, open weights and a larger voice library, and this post does not claim otherwise. You can test the output in the text to speech app.

For plan-level detail on ElevenLabs, read our ElevenLabs pricing breakdown. For a comparison aimed at voiceover teams, read Murf AI alternatives for voiceovers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best alternative to ElevenLabs in 2026?

There is no single winner. Creators who want narration with commercial rights often compare Speechify Studio, WellSaid, Murf and OndaLabs. Developers usually compare API unit rates from Fish Audio, Google, Amazon, OpenAI and Cartesia. Pick the tool whose unit, license and language coverage match your project.

Is there a free alternative to ElevenLabs?

Yes, several tools have free tiers, including Fish Audio, Cartesia, Speechify Studio and OndaLabs. Free tiers are for testing, and most do not include commercial use. Read the free plan terms before you publish any audio.

Which ElevenLabs alternative is cheapest per million characters?

On published list prices in this post, Amazon Polly Standard is the lowest at $4 per 1M characters. Standard is a different class of voice from the neural and generative models compared here, so this is not a like-for-like quality comparison. Among neural options, OpenAI tts-1 at $15 per 1M characters is lower than Amazon Polly Neural at $16, and Google Chirp 3 HD costs $30.

What is the best ElevenLabs alternative for voice cloning?

The answer depends on consent, plan and language. Cartesia includes instant voice cloning on its Pro plan at $5 a month. Fish Audio says voice cloning has always been free, and its Plus plan includes one professional voice slot. OndaLabs clones from a recording you have permission to use, and its Creator plan includes 3 custom voices.

Are there open-weights alternatives to ElevenLabs?

Fish Audio is the open-weights option verified for this post. Its Drama 3 model is released under the Fish Audio Community License, which is free for research and for commercial use under a US$500,000 annual revenue threshold. Above that threshold, or if you offer the model as a service, you need a license.